“Last night his detective wasn’t dead.”
“Now, that is a fair observation.”
“Josiah, why don’t you just take the money I got and get—”
“You gone down to the hotel yet to check on Shaw?”
“No. You told me to get the phone first.”
“Right. Well, now I got it.”
Danny frowned. “All right. I’ll go. You just want to know if he’s there?”
“And where he goes if he leaves, yes. You got the numbers off the phones you bought, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, use the first one. Don’t even think about calling the second one, just the first, got it? Call if you see him move.”
Danny hesitated and then gave a short nod and moved toward the door. He stopped when he was just on the other side, turned back, and looked at Josiah, his face a pale moon in the lantern light.
“So you’re going to call this guy and ask for money? Like that’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all there’ll be to the start of it,” Josiah said. “I figure there could be a twist or two along the way.”
Evening came on and settled and the rain fell soundlessly but unrelenting. Anne sat in the living room with a book in her lap but didn’t read. The depth of her desire was surprising to her, the sense of urgent anticipation she had as she watched the clock tick minutes off the day and waited for the water to take effect.
Come on, she thought, let me see what he is seeing. Let me go back to those times I never appreciated enough when I was in them, let me see those faces and hear those voices again.
Nothing happened. The short hand found seven and then eight and then nine, and she saw nothing but the achingly familiar walls of the house. She considered going for more water, but the stairs seemed so steep and the results so uncertain that she stayed in her chair. She’d seen how much Eric Shaw had to drink before the visions came for him and was sure she’d had at least an equal amount. Why, then, was he allowed to see the past and she was not?
She went to bed after taking her last round of readings, turned off the light, and watched the shadows shift as the moon struggled for a space amidst the clouds. The water had not worked for her. She’d felt vaguely nauseated since taking it, but she had seen nothing. A wasted risk. How could she have allowed herself to do such a thing? The water could have poisoned her. Or, worse, wreaked the sort of havoc it had with Eric Shaw, putting her into the throes of pain and addiction.
Logical as all those thoughts might be, she couldn’t make herself care about them. She’d understood the risk well enough at the start, but the reward had seemed so tantalizing… and still did.
Maybe it started with his bottle, the bottle he claimed came from Campbell Bradford. Maybe you wouldn’t see anything until you’d tried some of that. She’d have to call him in the morning, see if he’d gotten the Bradford bottle back yet, hope it would work with her as it had with him. It seemed worth a try.
She had a sense, though, that it would not work. She could drink his water and still see nothing, still be trapped here in the present, the lonely present of this empty house, and the ones she’d loved would continue to exist merely as memories and fading photographs. Why was Eric Shaw allowed to see the past and she was not? Why was some of the world’s magic presented to only a few and hidden from others?
The visions would not come to her, no matter how much of the water she drank. She would wait for them without reward, just as she’d waited for the big storm, waited with faith and patience and a confidence of purpose that she would be needed, that there was a reason she remained here. They’d need her someday; they’d need her knowledge and her trained eye and her shortwave radio. She had been certain of it.
But maybe not. Maybe it was all a charade, a silly girl’s notion that she’d never let die. Maybe the storm was never coming.
“Enough,” she whispered to herself. “Enough of this, Annie.”
Sleep swept over her then, descending with the speed and weight of a long day filled with unusual activity. She had a dim realization, just before it took her, of a light whistling sound.
The wind was coming back.
44
I’M GETTING STRONGER, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.
The memory chased Eric up the stairs and back to his room, the words echoing through his brain.
He’d been real again. Without so much as a drop of the Bradford water passing through Eric’s lips, Campbell had been made real again. This time the vision had been a sort of hybrid, actually—a moment from the past again, yes, but this time Eric had been a participant as well as a spectator.